Context: was looking for a decent service to give me a calendar a little while back but one thing that kept stopping me is there seems to be absolutely no service that just offers you a nice calendar, its only email services that happen to offer a calendar on the side.
I don't want another email. I have enough, and my current one is tied down to gmail (but I'd prefer if my calendar wasn't).
I'm sure there must a historical reason for this, but also why is does it still persevere?
One is a scheduling and time management thing, the other a communication system. I don't need to sign up for a messaging app to have a todo list.
Stop thinking about what you want and think about what companies do for the answer.
You start a company to provide email service. You hire some developers and they craft the unique features for your email service. Once your email service is stable and secure, you don't just fire 9/10 of the staff and call it done? Email is enough for home users. But they don't like paying for email when every ISP out there gives it away for free. The bread and butter is business. They LOVE paying a small fee for every user. The size of that fee moves with services offered. All of a sudden, you're pushing your developers to offer Authentication, chat, calendar, file share, web serving, app development/hosting, directory services, video conferencing, VOIP phone service.
From a business standpoint, all these things things that seem like disparate services, tie together very well as you have entire teams that use the services in a coordinated fashion.
From your standpoint, you just want a calendar. But no one is going to pay someone to host a calendar for them. There's not enough signal intelligence in just a calendar to make selling your data worth it, so you have to choose from a package.